Administration of hazardous medicaments such as cytotoxins and the like, has long been a nuisance to the personal which on daily basis administrate the hazardous medicaments. During preparation of medicaments, administration or after treatment, nursing personal is exposed to the risk of contamination from the hazardous medicaments. Such contamination may be in the form of liquid medicaments, derived from spillage due to ill handling or just wrong handling of equipments or instruments. Leakage from technical equipment which has been used right is however also a problem, even if leakage occur in very small doses. Due to long exposure to hazardous medicaments nursing personal can still be ill from very small quantities of hazardous medicaments. It is therefore important to minimize leakage and minimize the risk of leakage.
One specific hazardous step is when e.g. nursing personal is transferring a medicament from one fluid container to another; such transfer usually involves the use of a piercing member such as a needle. To protect the nursing personal involved, piercing member protection devices are commonly used. Such devices are arranged to protect the user, not only from contamination but also from accidentally piercing themselves or any other third persons.
In the patent publication of U.S. Pat. No. 6,890,328 a connector device for establishing fluid communication between a diluents container having side walls and a drug vial is described. The drug vial may be selectively attached to the device without piercing the closure of the vial and without breaching the hermetic seal of the fluid accessing portions of the piercing member. Means are provided for connecting the vial receiving chamber to the liquid container. The device is movable from an inactivated position, where the piercing member is outside the sidewalls and no fluid flows between the liquid container and the drug vial, to an activated position, where fluid flows through the fluid pathway between the liquid container and the drug vial. The device is movable from the inactivated position to the activated position by a force applied to the device outside the liquid container. However at any time the drug vial and diluents container can be disconnected, leaving the needle exposed to the nursing personal. The needle at such stage is full of hazardous medicaments.
Another medical connector is described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,514,117, for connecting transferring a fluid from a first fluid container to a second fluid container for administration of fluid to a patient. The medical connector is formed of two components. The first component includes a cannula hub to which a cannula is mounted, a base extending from the hub and fingers extending from the base. The second component is a collar including a support and bars extending therefrom. The collar is manually slideable along the first component in the direction the cannula extends between a retracted position and a locking position. The bars engage the fingers to flex into engagement with a junction terminal. The bars are elastically deformable to provide a spring force for locking the fingers on the junction terminal. The medical connector have however the drawback that the locking of the fingers easily can be unlocked by simply pulling apart either the collar or the junction terminal and thereby expose a user for contaminants.